Video games represent a significant monetary investment rivaling movie productions. Before a game developer commits to development, the developer would like to have some level of confidence their monetary investment will result in financial success. The Applicant's own work has made significant progress toward informing game developers of risks or benefits of their planned game as described in co-owned U.S. Pat. No. 7,580,853 to Short et al. titled “Methods of Providing a Marketing Guidance Report for a Proposed Electronic Game”, filed Aug. 13, 2007. In the Applicants' approach, characteristics of a new game are compared to characteristics of known historical games to offer guidance to the developer as to which characteristics would likely be most desirable for inclusion in a game.
The Applicants have come to further appreciate that telemetry data obtained from a gaming device can also be compared against gaming contexts defined in terms of telemetry data of known games. Furthermore, the telemetry data can be compared to gaming contexts that include marketing performance data or metrics associated with known games. Although some effort has been directed to collecting telemetry data per se, others have failed to appreciate that telemetry data from one game can be compared to telemetry data from other, different games.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,778,536 to Qureshi et al. titled “Automated Detection of Problems in Software Application Deployments”, filed Dec. 21, 2005, describes a system for monitoring software applications where an analysis engine detects potential problems. Although useful for detecting faults in software, Qureshi fails to provide insight into simply collecting telemetry data related to an electronic game.
To the extent the sports are games, U.S. patent application 2010/0283630 to Alonso titled “Sports Telemetry System for Collecting Performance Metrics and Data”, filed May 3, 2010, discusses collecting telemetry data from an athlete playing a sport. Unfortunately, Alonso fails to provide insight into collecting telemetry data across multiple games, let alone multiple gaming contexts.
U.S. patent application publication 2008/0262786 to Pavlidis titled “Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) Games as Ubiquitous Activity Based Gaming”, filed Apr. 21, 2008, describes acquiring a game participant's telemetry data, but fails to appreciate the value of the telemetry data as compared to known contexts.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,632,186 to Spanton et al. titled “Spectator Mode for a Game”, and U.S. patent application publication 2007/0117635 also to Spanton et al. titled “Dynamic Spectator Mode”, both filed Nov. 21, 2005, describes receiving telemetry data of a game player playing a game and re-broadcasting the telemetry data to spectators. Interestingly, the spectators can submit feedback, but the disclosed system fails to offer any indication of how the game play compares to other games in general.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,500,916 to Lieberman et al. titled “Strategy Analysis Tool Generating a Two Dimensional Image Overlaid with Telemetry Data”, filed Nov. 7, 2005, describes further progress in evaluating gaming telemetry data. Lieberman allows users to review their game sessions from a statistical stand point. Still, Lieberman also fails to appreciate that telemetry data from a game can be compared to different games.
Unless the context dictates the contrary, all ranges set forth herein should be interpreted as being inclusive of their endpoints, and open-ended ranges should be interpreted to include commercially practical values. Similarly, all lists of values should be considered as inclusive of intermediate values unless the context indicates the contrary.
It has yet to be appreciated that telemetry data from known games can be aggregated into a data warehouse as known gaming contexts, especially where contexts can represent disparate telemetry data sets. The gaming contexts can also be stored according to a normalized taxonomy to allow for ease of comparison from one telemetry data set to another. When current telemetry data satisfies criteria relative to the known gaming contexts, an event can be triggered to surface insights on the relationship between the two sets of data. Developers, or other entities involved with game production or distribution, can leverage the events to gain insight into market performance of an existing game or a game to be deployed.
Thus, there is still a need for gaming analysis engines capable of comparing telemetry data of a current game to telemetry data of other known games.